Digging a ditch by hand, bringing me gardenias

The gardenias have begun to bloom in the valley. My flowers are finally here.

June 16th, a month ago, was the anniversary of Villain’s Valley. 2025 marks the fourth year.

My own little plot in front of the house provides more than enough to be self-sufficient, and in the valley behind—once a place inhospitable to humans—a fragrance now lingers. I must thank these scarred hands; over four years, they painstakingly carved out a ditch to bring me these gardenias.

◉ Gratitude to these hands for bringing me a gardenia (the key point of the left image is the difference in wrist colour).

I. A Gardenia for Me

For a foodie, the ability to eat is the only thing that truly matters.

In June 2021, I arrived here with dreams of self-sufficiency to break new ground and start farming. The primary task of the first year was preparing the land. My requirements were modest: as long as things could grow, and as long as they were edible, I didn’t mind what they were.

Reclaiming the land was far more difficult than I had imagined. It took four months, and it wasn’t until autumn that I finally managed to prepare a patch of cultivable soil. I started with vegetables: the first tier consisted of fast-growing leafy greens, and the second tier of winter crops. Rice, grains, and fruit trees were planned for the following spring. Originally, there was no room for gardenias. In my vision of the land, gardenias didn’t exist; they were a rarity for people from the North.

In the late spring of 2022, I spotted white blossoms blooming by the roadside during a morning run. After some careful observation and inquiry, I diagnosed them as the legendary gardenias—single-petal varieties. Since wild roadside flowers are a waste not to pick, I spent my days gathering them.

◉ Gardenia season: the daily routine of a flower thief.

Later, I tentatively dug some up to try planting them, fearing they wouldn’t take. However, a local friend told me that these flowers are “very low-maintenance”. By “low-maintenance”, they meant hardy and easy to grow. As it turned out, this was true. They are like osmanthus—common roadside trees in the South, but prone to dying the moment they hit Northern soil; every region has its own flora.

Later still, driven by a foodie’s instinct to dare and experiment, I tested them myself, confirming that gardenias are indeed edible—and delicious.

Once the picked petals are dried halfway and sugared, they turn into a floral jam, which can then be used to make gardenia flower cakes. These are superior to the common rose flower cakes found on the market, sitting firmly at the top of the food chain in Villain’s Valley.

Achieving self-sufficiency with gardenias takes at least three years, if not longer.

II. The Three-Year Rule of Self-Sufficiency

Although Fujian allows for two harvests a year, in my experience of planting, many things operate on a “three-year” cycle: the first year is a victory if you can recover the seeds; the second year is spent learning the hard way; and only by the third year do things get on track. I achieved self-sufficiency with vegetables first, then staple grains; the transition from “eating whatever is available” to “having whatever I want to eat” took roughly three years.

Fujian is humid and rainy, so most oilseed crops that prefer dry soil were a lost cause. I tried sunflowers (both oil and ornamental varieties), but they failed; flax also failed; I didn’t even dare try sesame. Red-coat peanuts are a landmark crop here, but their oil yield is low, so I plant the “Xiao Baisha” variety from my hometown. Because the initial land reclamation in 2021 dragged on, I missed the autumn peanut planting season. In 2022, I planted both spring and autumn crops and barely recovered my seeds. By 2023, I had enough to eat and enough seeds, but still not enough for oil extraction. However, there was an unexpected windfall: after pulling up the autumn peanuts, I planted rapeseed as green manure. This spring, from a golden sea of blossoms, I unexpectedly harvested nearly fifty jin of rapeseed. Oil self-sufficiency is no longer an issue.

My bees grew from two hives to six, and honey is now plentiful. Thus, only salt remains a necessity to buy. My next small goal is self-sufficiency with gardenias.

During gardenia season in Villain’s Valley, petals are everywhere—on the dining table, in the bedroom, on the workbench. It seems cluttered, but there is a subtle intention behind it. Wherever I go, a faint fragrance lingers, and the tiger in my heart is well satisfied. The mouth and the body need good food, but the heart with its fierce tiger needs to recognise flowers by their scent.

Give me a gardenia, and I shall not forget who I am. In the bustle of a life spent striving for sustenance, one sometimes forgets the small soul that exists beyond the mouth and the flesh. The gardenias in the valley are a gift to myself.

◉ How the valley looks now. The plants I’ve planted, from left to right, are: one-year-old Wild Ginger, Duckweed, Bulrush, Water Hyacinth, Wild Ginger, and Plantain.

III. Capability and Boundaries

On 16th June 2022, the first anniversary of Villain’s Valley, I made a bet with my neighbour: for one year, I would not hire anyone and would handle everything myself. The stakes were ten jin of Ruiyan Fragrant Rice.

At the time, I considered myself a “veteran farmer” of four years: two years of rice farming in Taiwan, one year of vegetable-rice cropping in Gutian, and one year of reclaiming land in Villain’s Valley. In Taiwan, my rice and vegetable plots totalled nearly three mu. Aside from mechanical tilling and harvesting, I handled everything single-handedly and enjoyed the challenge.

My practice in Villain’s Valley met its end on 13th October 2022. The rice had ripened and had to be harvested, but I had been running a fever for a week that simply would not break.

The most painful loss wasn’t the ten jin of Ruiyan rice, but having to acknowledge the boundaries of my own capabilities.

That year seemed to be a constant state of injury. Cutting my hand or knocking my head were trifles; the real danger came when I tripped while pushing a heavy cart and was sent flying, or when a falling door panel crashed into my chest while I was lifting. Fortunately, I escaped serious harm. The fact that vehicles I usually controlled and weights I could usually handle repeatedly spiralled out of control showed that my ambitions had exceeded my body’s capacity.

As a novice farmer in Taiwan, I was able to work independently thanks to the flat, fertile Lanyang Plain, its efficient and standardised drainage systems, and a comprehensive support network. Villain’s Valley tests not only physical strength and skill but also poses a comprehensive challenge to one’s choices, judgment, and adaptability. I had to learn more than just the sixty-eight arts of reclaiming land and farming; I had to acknowledge the boundaries of my capability and accept my own helplessness.

The eastern boundary of Villain’s Valley is a village road, and the western is a mountain valley. During the land reclamation phase, my use of the valley was passive; the mountains of bamboo roots and miscellaneous trees I dug up were simply pushed into the ditch to save on transport costs. How much waste was dug out? As shown in the image below, the ridge on the right is the original boundary of the land. The large slope beyond the ridge was gradually levelled during the reclamation process, creating a strip of land about three metres wide.

◉ The riverside landscape. The high ridge on the right is the boundary of the land; the several peanut plots in the centre were created by filling in with reclamation waste.

Originally, both sides of the valley were overgrown with bamboo and grass as tall as a person. There were bamboo roots that couldn’t be fully cleared, weeds that wouldn’t stop returning, endless injuries, and money spent. The alfalfa seeds alone cost over two thousand yuan.

My original plan was to sow alfalfa in the areas beyond the farmland and vegetable patches. This perennial, deep-rooted grass can become the dominant vegetation to conserve soil and water and suppress weeds; moreover, it is delicious—the royalty of grass proteins—and tastes absolutely divine when made into steamed dishes or wheat rice.

The first batch of seeds cost over a thousand yuan for thirty kilograms. The germination rate was good, but I had overlooked the weed seeds already in the soil. The alfalfa was no match for the wild grass at the edge of the fields and was quite literally bullied to death. I cleared the weeds and sowed the alfalfa again, weeding time and time again, but the dominant plant here remained the weed. Later, I hired an excavator to spread the sludge from the bottom of the ditch over the top layer, thinking that the sludge would be free of weed seeds and the alfalfa would finally prevail. I had miscalculated again, forgetting the invisible wind and the weed seeds it carries. The weeding not only wore out my hands but broke my heart.

◉ The image above shows the original state of the mountain ditch: bamboo on the left and grass on the right, both much taller than I am. The image below shows the ditch as it is now.

IV. Compromising Between the Ideal and Reality

Unable to cope by hand, I had no choice but to hire a “strange hand”. An excavator, known in Taiwan as a “guai shou” (strange hand)—and a strange hand it is.

While in Taiwan, I learned from an old farmer that keeping field ridges vertical makes weed control easier. I figured that if I could make the slopes of the mountain ditch a bit steeper, I could not only control the weeds but also tidy up the ditch itself.

It seemed like a wonderful idea: dig out the years of accumulated sludge from the ditch and use it to fill the slopes. With steeper slopes, the ditch would narrow and the water would deepen, providing more land and fewer weeds, and I could even plant some lotuses and raise fish—hitting several targets with one stone. In reality, however, the ditch renovation became a bottomless pit. 2023 became the “Year of the Excavator” in the Valley of Villains, and I went through six different operators.

There is an old saying that “rotten mud cannot support a wall”, and the slushy mud in the ditch was exactly that. Whenever the excavator dumped a bucket of this thin soup onto the slope, it immediately slid right back down the side of the ditch, barely leaving a thin film on the surface before being washed away by the first rain.

Rotten mud cannot support a wall, yet I refused to give up on this ditch. So, I hired excavator after excavator, only to be slapped in the face by the mud time and again. It wasn’t until the fifth operator that a solution was found: he first pushed the dry soil from the cliff edge into the ditch, creating a soil wall about one metre wide and over one metre high between the slope and the gully. Only then did he fill in the slushy mud, creating a brand-new planting area.

With the mud sorted, I built two small dams, each over a metre high, creating two plantable water surfaces of over a hundred square metres. I bought all sorts of aquatic plants: water bamboo, water caltrops, and water chestnuts. I bought the most lotus roots—both the starchy and the crunchy varieties. I wanted to transform this mosquito-ridden mud ditch into a dreamlike lotus pond, with white lotuses blooming to the north and red lotuses to the south.

Sadly, after a year of frantic planting, not a single lotus flower appeared, and nothing else survived. Perhaps it was because the soil was too raw, or perhaps the mud dams were simply not watertight.

The 2023 construction season ended with the installation of concrete dams.

I had always resisted concrete, trying my best to avoid hardening the land and reducing human encroachment. Initially, both dams were made of earth. Of course, I knew that not only could rotten mud not support a wall, but loess also couldn’t withstand erosion, so I took precautions. I drove wooden stakes vertically and horizontally into the base, and the body of the dam was a multi-layered “mud-concrete” made of alternating layers of soil and camouflage netting. The surface of the dam, where the water flowed, was covered with double-thick plastic film, while grass was planted elsewhere to secure the surface soil and stabilise the structure.

This idea, much like the alfalfa, was a case of the ideal being lush and the reality being stark. Fujian is rainy, and every heavy downpour swept away the surface vegetation and washed away the topsoil. After each rain, I would cover it with soil and replant, only for another rain to follow, until finally, I surrendered to the concrete dams.

V. Planting Wildflowers with Intent

With the concrete dams in place, I no longer had to worry about flood control, and I began planting frantically. I spent over a thousand yuan on lotuses alone. Various shoots appeared, but not a single lotus leaf survived—my lotus pond dream was destroyed by ducks. My neighbours, both upstream and downstream, had started raising ducks. As beginners, they lacked experience, and their duck pens were riddled with holes that could never be fully plugged. “Guerrilla ducks” roamed freely everywhere; just as the tiny lotus shoots began to peak through, they became duck lunch.

◉ The guerrilla ducks that frequently come to visit.

However, that doesn’t mean my 2024 was a total failure. While I lost the lotuses, I gained wild ginger and coreopsis.

Both the wild ginger and coreopsis grow wild by the roadside, costing me not a penny. The wild ginger rhizomes came from a ditch in a neighbouring village, and I stumbled upon the coreopsis during my morning run.

The coreopsis is like flame, a brilliant gold that ignites the emotions, while the wild ginger is pure white and fragrant, with an intoxicating scent. I adore each of them with equal affection.

I planted the coreopsis higher up on the banks, level with the road, while the water-loving wild ginger was planted in a line along the waterline. Both are perennial grasses and are dominant in the local vegetation; by the second year, a single plant can grow into a cluster. Now, small carpets of golden flowers already adorn the banks. Next year, these carpets will merge into one, and in three years, there will be walls of wildflowers lining both sides of the ditch.

Woody gardenias require more time than wild ginger lilies or coreopsis. The minutiae of transplanting, taking cuttings, and daily maintenance are ordinary, tedious tasks that stretch on indefinitely. I exist within the life of the flowers, and the flowers within mine.

VI. The Flower’s Heart Lies Within its Core

By 2025, before the fourth anniversary, the final stage of infrastructure at Villain’s Valley was completed. At the front of the house, there is finally a gate, creating a conscious boundary between the outside world and my life. Behind the house, I built a pavilion spanning the east and west sides of the valley. The gate and the pavilion serve no productive purpose; they are not essential farm infrastructure. They are a reward to myself.

Though Villain’s Valley is small, there is never-ending work to be done, save for the scorching midday heat, when I am forced to stop. Summers in Fujian are long and oppressive, and the pavilion over the valley is a sanctuary of cool. The hammock is hung a little higher, facing west, where my view is filled with the brilliant gold of the coreopsis; the rocking chair is lower, facing east, looking directly towards my gardenia slope. In the intervals between labour, I collapse into the hammock or the rocking chair to leaf through a book, or perhaps read nothing at all, pondering useless questions like “why do we live”, or thinking of nothing at all.

◉ The pavilion spanning the valley is the coolest spot in Villain’s Valley during the summer. A small bunch of gardenias can be seen on the tabletop in the image below.

I love that quote by Sartre: “No matter what kind of hellish environment we find ourselves in, I believe we have the freedom to break it; if someone does not break it, it is because they have freely chosen to remain within it—that is to say, they have freely placed themselves in hell.”

Everyone has their own fate. It can be destiny—intangible and elusive. Or it can be life—the physical body and its three meals a day. How this shell of a body is settled is partly due to the invisible workings of providence, and partly the result of my own hands, shaping it through direct effort.

I have spent four years crafting a life of shutting out the world to live under the open sky. The pavilion in the valley is a gift to myself—the cherry on top.

The two slopes adjacent to the pavilion are planted with double-petal gardenias. Those with larger petals and leaves grow tall, while the smaller ones creep along the ground, forming a lush green carpet. For the gardenias I planted earliest, the process was: cuttings in the first year, transplanting in the second, and blooming in the third. Though only a few plants have flowered so far, I am in no hurry. After each flowering season, I prune and take cuttings, gradually expanding the plot. I believe that one day, I will have created a slope entirely blanketed in blossoms.

With beauty in my sight and fragrance adrift, the ease of a Southern King is within reach.

Foodthink Author

Kouzi

Farmer-trekker, village brewmaster. Full-time foodie, part-time farmer, amateur writer.

Unless otherwise stated, all images are provided by the author

Editor: Tianle

Digging a ditch by hand, bringing me gardenias | Grandma Kouzi